Just ignore the buggers and their profitable crap.

The wellness industrial complex !   Six rules to ditch –
and what to do instead.

Very little. Buy nothing.

'SEX'

It is a tragedy that this language
has shackled and sleazed the word,
offering no linguistic alternatives
(as Irish offers several words
for kinds and kindnesses of rain).

In a more ignorant time
(the nineteen-sixties)
we thought that the more
it was hidden, forbidden
the more toxic and driven
Sex could become for men.

We were sadly mistaken.
Anal-genital abuse is at least as rife,
sensuality just as rare in life,
since 'Sexual Liberation'.

Happy New Year by the road-side.

 

I have met only one Wise Man

in the long, narrow valley
of my life. He was
my professor of philosophy,
the gentle, self-effacing
Bryce Gallie.

Aspy in his eighties.

Even now sometimes

I shockingly & unashamedly reveal,

as I did in childhood, that I feel 

the only power I have

is to throw a tantrum.

Rest In Peace,

my brilliant namesake.

Meanwhile,

The Apotheosis of Ego,

time's backwardness.
I am
אני
The Great Yam
or Yahoo in the sky.
Don't ask me why.

עֵת תעֵ

Double Rubens ; Hairy Lady !

In the recent past, studies by Rubens
have sold for between £500,000 and £1m or more.

Composite:
Peter Paul Rubens/Klaas Muller/Brafa Art Fair

The study of an old man was painted on a re-used sheet of paper, and when turned over, the silhouette of a woman’s head appears through the model’s beard.

'Neurodivergent Homosexuality'

or simple criminality ?
When I was just queer-ish,
part of its attraction
was its unacceptability –
indeed, its illegality.

Plants against Israel

in Gaza.

'The best gravedigger in Britain'

A man I could fall in love with
forever.

Jon Yaxley

 

Big Bangs

I was born just a decade before
the Hydrogen Bomb and the start
of the long Explosions of Choice
and Explosions of Ease
(even - though slightly - for its poor)
as the Free World
continued the rapid exploitation
and the slow but big
burning of our biosphere....

On Shelley's rapturous 'Mont Blanc'

To most human minds
silence and solitude are vacancy,
not chance for trance sublime and strange
nor
to ponder, each in and on its separate fantasy.

How many human minds long to 
render and receive fast influencings,
and hold an unremitting interchange
with the clear universe of things around ?

No clear universe...All is murk befogged and strife
and urbanisation,
no naked Alpine countenance of nature
but deglaciation.

Mont-Blanc:
Lines written in the Vale of Chamouni

Confession.

I love the taste

of my sleeping-pills,

which is not unlike 100%-cocoa chocolate.

They are also mildly-antidepressant

and free to the poor like me..

To delicious Zolpidem

for the the polynocturia-afflicted

(sometimes five times a night)

I am happily addicted...

An early anonymous meme:

Plus je connais les hommes, mieux j'aime les chiens !

The better I know men, the better I like dogs !
first appeared in print in 1822 in

Reflections of 'A Lady' in the Mirror of the Somme.

It is often misquoted,
or a misquotation is wrongly attributed to
Lamartine, Pascal... even Bismarck, and often to
Madame Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein,

whose best remark/dictum/aphorism/apophthegm is:

Glory is grief sparkling with joy.
« La gloire est le deuil éclatant du bonheur. ».

(And sometimes panicles
of joy are cast out of despair
like sperm from testicles.)

Lucky, but...

From what I have read
in books and newspapers,
it is often unpleasant
to have a father.

So, fatherless, I count myself lucky.

But this has meant that
I love to see men
and portraits of men
who, in a less imperfect,
less patristic world,
might have been my father. 

We two kings of orient

never were. The legend of the epiphanic kings
grew out of the stories of the Magi (sometimes
numbering twelve)
when Christianity ceased to be
a religion of slaves and the poor,
to become an imperial cult under Constantine
the Great Corrupter. 

It's rather cold outside.

 

SCRIPTS

The Kufic script
is lovelier than Islam.

THE LATIN SCRIPT
is not as ugly as
missionary Christianity;

the Hebrew script
less beautiful than
the non-evangelism
of Judaism.

A strong contender

for 'The Beginning of the End'
in 1593.

Woke Fascism

though strident
is much less powerful
than the old sleepwalking kind.

 

A lot of what

is called self-esteem
is really concern about
the opinions of others.

Because You're Worth it,*

you are, in fact, worthless.
Capitalism always capitalises,
and reduces us.

*a famous Pepsi-Cola advertisement slogan.

There's nothing like an open-air hot-spring bath

 on a cold January morning.

Taken when I had more hair.

Then, nicely warmed up, I go and
waken my canine pals.

Fifty-three

years ago
this was me.

Longer ago than that,
a rhinoceros sniffed Dalí 

More recently,
in Aït Mansour,
I took tea.

ⴰⵏⵜⵓⵏⵉ, ⴰⵉⵜ ⵎⴰⵏⵙⵓⵔ

A fine machine

on which to ride into 2026.

Kidus Tesera  and his wood-framed bicycle

Pandora's Box

Hope, unfortunately,
springs
(or dribbles out) eternal
from human cocks.

'The Secret of Eternal Life'

If it's a secret
I don't want to know it.

Snowdrop today !

Hooray !

Outside my door, 29-12-2025.

My friend Bob's

equinoctial, Christmas and New Year
(and anytime-you-like) card.

Thank-you, Bob. 

To add to (and depict some) December gaiety
here is a painting by a splendid painter 
who once lived here in Caylus
(with her husband, Yosip Zadkine).

Valentine Prax - Drunkard

Bromance in Florida.

 

Was this another Bromance ?

Armenian Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan 
(Անաստաս Հովհաննեսի Միկոյան, right)

was the only one of the original Bolsheviks
to survive, and indeed, steadfastly outlive Georgian
Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, alias Stalin (left).

also from Wikipedia:

Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili (იოსებ ბესარიონის ძე ჯუღაშვილი), represented in Russian as Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (Иосиф Виссарионович Джугашвили; pre-1918: Іосифъ Виссаріоновичъ Джугашвили) adopted the alias "Stalin" during his revolutionary career, and made it his legal name after the October Revolution.

We anti-beings,

cut-out creatures of the universe,
live as if we were significant.

photo by Sergei Gapon

 

Inequality of Sympathy.

The housed-and-well-fed

bereaved

grieving 

or angry

should have a passing,

discomforting thought

for the malnourished bereaved 

who are homeless and hungry.

 

On the Feast of Holy Solitude.

The temperature was just two degrees

when I woke up on Christmas Mo[u]rn 

I put on my new moccasins (hardly worn)

made in the distant orient (Cathay),

my old but clean green corduroys worn at the knees,

and a clean shirt (only slightly torn)

bought with small money wisely spent,

and went downstairs to breakfast

on delicious cold porridge

made last Saturday 

from bulghur-like pinhead oatmeal,

with fromage-blanc and half a lactase-pill,

and very dark coffee from Rwanda 

in deepest, starkest Africay, 

filched from a supermarket 12 miles away.

*

Oscar Wilde

said shallowly
that Outcasts always mourn.

But the unreviled

Inkept, sometimes profoundly careworn,

don't so frequently rejoice
on the back-side of Paradise.

'Waste not, want not.'

Waste of resources

Waste of space

Industrial waste

Human waste

Life of waste

Waste of life

Time of waste

Waste of Time

Time misplaced

Van Gogh admired Cézanne

but Cézanne, the old grunter,
did not admire van Gogh.
By comparing these two self-portraits
it's easy to see which is the 'better painter'.

Two Portraits.

The first, by Vincent van Gogh, is known as
Portrait de Paysan (1889). But it is actually
a portrait of Jean Barral, whose parents were
wicker-workers (basket-makers) and who himself
(then 28 years old) tended land close to
where Vincent was being looked after
in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.
He had not been identified
until long after his death in 1942,
so no-one ever asked him about the painter.
He might not even have remembered the portrait,
which of course was not sold
until long after Vincent's death.

The second (much smaller)
is a piece of poker-work by J.L.
which I bought at a village sale
in Rouergue around 2014 for two euros.
Unknown artist (in unusual medium),
unknown subject, unknown date. Very nice
to have, especially at the price!

I would prefer a living elephant.

Twelfth-century reliquary
in Burgos Cathedral, Spain.

I wonder if a non-Arab writer of the kufic script
copied a line from left to right
and had to squeeze it in ?

The peacock was a symbol of immortality

from Sumerian times.

Peacock on the palm-Tree of Life,
Iran, late 20th century.

Would Sartre's hell

of other (or 'other') people
be tolerable if they peeled
off their masks ?
Or would they still repel ?

How many stars

has The Hotel of Non-existence ?

I've pushed the table

against the wall.
Who's going to dine with me ?
Nobody at all.

My only friend here
doesn't like my food
and likes to eat in solitude.

 

The immensely learned and distinguished

professor Sven Beckert believes
that the origins of capitalism were in Aden
(the port-city of southern Yemen) in 1150 CE.
But I in my ignorant foolishness suggest
that capitalism could not have started without
the economic upheaval and stimulus
of the First Crusade, which connected France
directly with the 'Middle East',
via the four Frankish kingdoms of Palestine

The First Crusade (at the end of the 11th century)
would not have occurred
without the huge relief that the Year 1,000
had not brought the expected end of the world.
 
Many years ago I read somewhere
that the first capitalist enterprise
in Europe financed by shares or joint-stock
was (one or more of) the floating water-mills of Toulouse*.

*At the time a Cathar city.  Did Cathars join in any of the Crusades ?  Google etc. can tell me only about The Cathar Genocide, alias the Albigensian Crusade and its concomitant land-grab by Northerners.

What they don't tell you

about Asperger's:
when you get old
it may creep back
and take a hold.

The Chosen and the Unchosen

15 Jews were killed in Australia because they were Jews
– a few chosen by terrorists and by the world's news.

150,000 Sudanese have been killed in Sudan
because they existed and were not chosen.

photo by Izhar Khan

Across a desk, behind a window.

Governance
reduces everything
but itself.

And the government
is as much your friend
as the police.

The Nose

 

'Neurodivergence'

Minorities have mushroomed
in my lifetime. Only in my eighties
did I realise that I am an untypically
eye-contacting poly-æsthetic Aspy.
Like many Aspies
I don't like groups
or ceremonies. 

*

Now I learn
that I'm not just different and dissident
but also limerent.  

I still remember my first and only girlfriend
of sixty years ago, at least twice a week
with pangs. I've seen her Bornholmian house
on Google Earth, maybe even her car -
though I don't know if she can drive
or indeed if she's still alive.

It was another fifteen years before
I found my next voluptuous
(though not heartfelt)
sweet lover - queer
(not capable of repression or guilt
I cruised him in a WC)
but now barely remembered. 

Then, resultantly, sometimes exultantly
came another...and another...and another.
Some have faded utterly.

I am maybe more encumbered
by pangs of memory
for my second, final, comparatively-recent
fleshly passion (just as brief)
of twenty years ago
and our delicious, ultra-pleasant,
multi-sensual lechery...

Strange, serial monogamy !

Tim Berners-Lee,

inventor of the Word-wide Web,
asked recently on the BBC
how he'd manage,
if he were to be
permanently off-line
said: I'd be fine.

The name means "no water"

because the Koala gets all it needs
from eucalyptus leaves. It sleeps much of the time
because so much energy is required
to digest and detoxify the leaves. 

Moreover, can eat only a few of the hundred species of eucalyptus that grow in Australia, so its habitats, always very limited, are now extremely vulnerable, due to ever-encroaching destruction.

Weakly-interacting Massive Particles.

When two wimps collide, they can annihilate one another.

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